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How to display conjugations in word order?

Posted: 13 Sep 2020 19:30
by rainbowcult
I have been exploring the translation section of the site, and users will often put the word order under the text, however said word order often has things I don't understand. Usually it looks something like this: text.GIBBERISH. I assumed these were conjugations. How do I display them in my language? Specifically, how would I display verb agreement?

Re: How to display conjugations in word order?

Posted: 13 Sep 2020 19:58
by Jackk
Hi! [:D] These are known as (interlinear) glosses, and usually follow the Leipzig glossing conventions. More detail can be found here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of ... reviations

Re: How to display conjugations in word order?

Posted: 13 Sep 2020 20:03
by Dormouse559
What Jackk said, and this is the set of guidelines for using those abbreviations: https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/pdf/Glossing-Rules.pdf

Exactly how you use these will vary because different languages mark categories differently. If you have questions on how the glossing rules apply specifically to your conlang, please feel free to ask [:)]

Re: How to display conjugations in word order?

Posted: 14 Sep 2020 01:30
by Salmoneus
rainbowcult wrote: 13 Sep 2020 19:30 I have been exploring the translation section of the site, and users will often put the word order under the text, however said word order often has things I don't understand. Usually it looks something like this: text.GIBBERISH. I assumed these were conjugations. How do I display them in my language? Specifically, how would I display verb agreement?
As Jackk and Dormouse have said, the convention is to employ, more or less, Leipzig Glossing Rules. If you can't open Dormouse's pdf file, by the way, then a webpage version [urlhttps://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php]can be found here.[/url]

A really basic intro is: the meanings of word roots are in lowercase text, word-for-word (if you need more than one word, you can put an underscore: if you have a single word that means "eat cabbage", you can gloss it "eat_cabbage"). The capital letters indicate grammatical information that's being conveyed. This keeps the two clear and separate.

The two things you're likely to see are:

waga-ya
text-GIBBERISH

...which means that 'waga' in the conlang means 'text' in English, and -ya is an affix that conveys the grammatical information 'GIBBERISH' (if you'e using hyphens like this, there should be the same number in both the conlang text and the English gloss;

and:

wuga
text.GIBBERISH

...which means that 'wuga' can't be divided into two parts with distinct meanings, and the word simultaneously conveys both the meaning 'text' and the grammatical information 'GIBBERISH'.


So in English, we can have:

eat-s
eat-3SG

(this says that 'eat' means 'eat' (obviously!), and '-s' means 'this has third-person singular agreement'

Or:

ate
eat.PST

(this says that 'ate' means 'eat' but in the past tense, but there isn't a specific bit of 'ate' that indicates 'past tense' by itself)


[there's a bunch of detailed rules and optional rules - like you can write that last one as "PST\ate" if you prefer - but you don't need to worry about them]


However, the bigger picture here is:

- don't worry
- most of it's very intuitive once you get the hang of it
- the point isn't to test whether you can follow an arbitary set of rules; the point is to communicate the info clearly and concisely
- you can always vary the conventions if it suits you better, if you explain what you're doing (or if it's obvious enough)
- in particular, although there are conventional abbreviations for things, you can use your own abbreviations if you explain them. Like, officially you should mark distributives as "DISTR"... but if they're really common in a language and you don't want to have to keep repeating a four-letter abbreviation, you could just say, for example, DS (assuming there's nothing else in your language that could stand for).


So, how would you indicate verb agreement? Well, it depends what qualities your verbs agree with. But if it's a European-style language and they agree in person and number, then:

- if there's not a specific affix for the agreement, but something like ablaut (eat-ate) or suppletion (go-went), then you can use a "."
- if there's a specific affix, then separate this out with a '-' in both the conlang and the translation
- use '1', '2' or '3' to indicate person
- use 'SG' or 'PL to indicate singular or plural
- if there's one affix for number and one for person, then again, you should separate them with a hyphen, in the correct order: 1-PL or SG-2 or whatever
- if there's only a single affix that conveys both person and number (like in most European languages), then you technically should divide them in the gloss with a dot, with person first: 1.PL, 2.SG, etc
- however, these affixes are so common that people generally ignore the dot and write '1PL', '2SG', etc, or even just '1p', '2s', etc.

Re: How to display conjugations in word order?

Posted: 14 Sep 2020 07:38
by eldin raigmore
Thank you, Salmoneus, for that summary/introduction.
It’s also helpful and useful to people who’ve read a lot of IMGs but haven’t written one in a while.

Re: How to display conjugations in word order?

Posted: 17 Oct 2020 21:00
by Khemehekis
eldin raigmore wrote: 14 Sep 2020 07:38 Thank you, Salmoneus, for that summary/introduction.
It’s also helpful and useful to people who’ve read a lot of IMGs but haven’t written one in a while.
IMG's?

Did you mean ILG's?

Re: How to display conjugations in word order?

Posted: 18 Oct 2020 00:58
by eldin raigmore
Khemehekis wrote: 17 Oct 2020 21:00
eldin raigmore wrote: 14 Sep 2020 07:38 Thank you, Salmoneus, for that summary/introduction.
It’s also helpful and useful to people who’ve read a lot of IMGs but haven’t written one in a while.
IMG's?

Did you mean ILG's?
I meant Interlinear Morphemic Glosses.
...
Does ILG stand for
Inter Linearmorphemic Glosses?
;-)

Re: How to display conjugations in word order?

Posted: 18 Oct 2020 01:00
by Khemehekis
eldin raigmore wrote: 18 Oct 2020 00:58
Khemehekis wrote: 17 Oct 2020 21:00 IMG's?

Did you mean ILG's?
I meant Interlinear Morphemic Glosses.
...
Does ILG stand for
Inter Linearmorphemic Glosses?
;-)
I see.

Had never heard of the "morphemic" part of the name.

I knew them only as InterLinear Glosses.

Re: How to display conjugations in word order?

Posted: 19 Oct 2020 20:04
by Sequor
I've never seen any acronym for them at all. I just see them called "glosses" for short.

Re: How to display conjugations in word order?

Posted: 19 Oct 2020 21:03
by Aevas
Sequor wrote: 19 Oct 2020 20:04 I've never seen any acronym for them at all. I just see them called "glosses" for short.
Same. Never seen either IMG or ILG to refer to glosses.

Re: How to display conjugations in word order?

Posted: 20 Oct 2020 06:24
by eldin raigmore
Aevas wrote: 19 Oct 2020 21:03
Sequor wrote: 19 Oct 2020 20:04 I've never seen any acronym for them at all. I just see them called "glosses" for short.
Same. Never seen either IMG or ILG to refer to glosses.
You’ve heard of the Leipzig Glossing Rules?

Re: How to display conjugations in word order?

Posted: 20 Oct 2020 14:15
by Creyeditor
Which I have seen abbreviated as LGR.

Re: How to display conjugations in word order?

Posted: 20 Oct 2020 22:55
by eldin raigmore
Creyeditor wrote: 20 Oct 2020 14:15 Which I have seen abbreviated as LGR.
The rules for making the interlinear morphemic glosses are the LGR.
The type of gloss made by such rules are the IMG or ILMG.

And one needn’t use an acronym.